Indigo's Owl [Indigo Rewrite]

Chapter 34 - Untethered

Shift followed Athira into a room that looked like it could have been a monitoring station for the building before she'd arrived and torn through it.

Tables had been thrown. Screens were smashed. The floor was littered with shards of glass and ceramic that looked to be a mix of vials, equipment, and coffee mugs. Eight unconscious individuals — mostly Elites — were scattered around the room, their blood speckled across the grey tiles.

The only exception to the chaos was a single scientist, awake, terrified, and bound to his chair with crystal Black in front of what seemed to be the only functioning computer in the room.

"That's Jeffrey," said Athira, flicking a finger towards the scientist as she passed him. "He was most helpful in answering my questions after he saw what happened to the Elites that didn't."

Athira stopped in front of the large, glass wall that Shift recognised as the central dome he'd seen earlier. The glass had the faint, ruby sheen of Redresin — the same stuff the Elites had slowly rebuilt the city from over the past decade or two.

"This Sleeper energy they're playing with isn't just a Colour," continued Athira, folding her arms. "It's a Sin. Sloth, to be precise. And these geniuses decided that they'd use that machine inside the dome to extract its essence, causing a Surge every time they did."

Her words sent a chill down Shift's spine as he looked over the sleek, grey construction sunk into the sloping stone at the centre of the dome. "If Sloth's trapped in Thols, then where's Rathe?"

"No idea," replied Athira. "But that's a mystery for another time. Right now, I need to make sure they can never use the damned extractor again. Jeffrey here tells me the only way to shut it down permanently would be to remove it, and apparently, it goes down a very long way."

Shift eyed the single, enclosed catwalk that extended into the dome where it met the top of the extractor. "Can we even do that?"

"I can," said Athira quietly, one arm tight around her waist as the other fiddled with her amulet. "The problem is, if that dome is filled with Sloth residue, I can't go in there. It'll have to be untethered Black."

Shift didn't need to see her face to understand her hesitation. "You can do it. I'll be with you the whole time."

"That's what I'm worried about," muttered Athira, continuing into the next room as they headed towards the entrance of the catwalk.

The next room was little more than rows of glass-doored cupboards filled with perfectly spaced vials of faintly glowing violet that cast an eerie glow around the room, but the room after that made Shift hesitate.

There were four Sleepers trapped in semi-transparent Red-shaped boxes. They looked identical to the one Indigo had fought at the subway station, though these were only a fraction of the size.

"Sloth residue," said Athira, noticing him looking at them. "Extracting Sloth's essence has been waking it up. It started leaking into places it shouldn't have been and coagulating into Sleepers."

Shift gave the enclosures a slightly wider berth as the Sleepers pawed at the edges. "Explains why a certain someone's Yellow worked on them a whole lot better than anything else."

They moved into the next room, which, thankfully, contained nothing except a few cupboards with hazmat suits. Athira opened the door to the dome's catwalk with a flicker of Black. Shift followed her inside. Their footsteps echoed off the narrow glass tunnel — Shift's far more than hers, no matter how softly he tried to place his feet.

"I should have known it was a Sin earlier," Athira muttered as she opened the second door of the catwalk's airlock. "I considered it after Reader sent me to Grandma's to learn about Spectrum, but even without that — the Surges always being below ground, the stories saying Sins were trapped at the core of a planet, the Sleeper goo showing up through the Black, just like Rathe's fire does." She huffed, passing through the third door. "I just never thought someone would actually be stupid enough to try and harness one."